Last Saturday at a house party I was talking to a stranger who told me about his obsession with world-improving start-ups. These specific start-ups are not only concerned with profit, but also have to show a certain ‘impact’. For example, the concept of these start-ups revolves around combating climate change or developing technical gadgets to improve public health.
Ah, public health! Now it gets interesting, I think to myself, and I ask if he has any examples of technological developments that will improve our health. He mentions that in the future any person with a sticker on his or her arm could keep track of blood values. You can then share this with your doctor so that your health can be monitored more closely.
I tell him about the ‘trawl method’: when you fish with a large trawl net you have a lot of bycatch, such as dolphins, plants and other fish that we don’t eat, but which are dead, destroying an entire ecosystem.
Unnecessarily worried or unjustly reassured
Exactly the same applies to unnecessarily measuring blood values or making a ‘total body scan’ in healthy people like you and me. You will then often find a (small) abnormality, but these tests do not give answers such as ‘you have cancer’ or ‘you don’t have it’; they are not specific enough for that and there is simply a lot of physiological variation in the human body.
So if you have no symptoms, it means nothing if you find an abnormality in a total body scan or a random blood value. Such ‘technological developments’ will cost society millions, worry people unnecessarily or even unjustly reassure them.
We would all like to believe that you can measure your health yourself with a few blood values or with a scan, but you can’t. The deterioration of the climate is also not a complete reflection based on a single CO2emission value. A climate expert has to look at the entire system. If you are ill, you therefore always need a consultation with an expert doctor or nurse. More measurement and research is not necessarily better.
Chronic disease or not
“So what do you think of the glucose meter for people with diabetes, so that they no longer have to prick themselves?” my interlocutor asks. He takes a sip of his non-alcoholic beer and I see a fitbit appear. Of course, this does not apply to all technological developments in the medical field. A glucose sensor is a wonderful solution for people with diabetes: we have to make a distinction between people with and people without (chronic) diseases.
Be critical of technological developments in the medical field, especially for healthy people. Think three times before buying a fitbit. Does it motivate you to move more? Fine. Want to obsessively monitor your health? That is not healthy. Sometimes you sleep well and sometimes a little less. Your heart is also beating normally, otherwise you wouldn’t have woken up this morning.
Sima Ghiassi, Amsterdam